Blood, Bones & Butter - By Gabrielle Hamilton Page 0,42

full-blown crisis as I was wheeling a proofing cabinet of two hundred boxed lunches—goat cheese and arugula pesto roll-ups—up the service entrance ramp to the building where, if I recall correctly, the National Book Foundation’s fall conference was taking place. Trying to quietly roll this metal cabinet filled to the top with the neatly packaged sandwiches and cookies, I squeaked down the hallway just outside the auditorium toward the lobby, where I was instructed to set out the self-serve lunches and then depart. The auditorium doors kept opening and closing as attendees came and went, and every time they opened, the voices of the panelists and their gorgeous words—Grace Paley? Galway Kinnell? Jamaica Kincaid? I thought I recognized so many of them but couldn’t be certain—floated out into the hallway. It felt almost cruel, to be schlepping this metal box on wheels down the corridor in my chef whites and black clogs, while inside that auditorium was a roomful of people I wanted to be. A roomful of people who did just the kind of work I wished I could do. For the first time in my twenty years in a kitchen I felt a real sting to be feeding, and not mingling with, the roomful of people.

Dave, the driver, was waiting in the idling van with the radio fixed to Hot 97 and blasting so loud that the windows vibrated. I banged on the side of the van, and he popped out and helped me load the empty proofing cabinet into the back. Shaggy blasted out of the cargo van’s speakers, “I’m Mr. Boombastic, say me fantastic.…” Over which Dave yelled, “Back to the shop?”

“I’m done, Dave. This lunch gig was my only booking for the day. Can you clock me out when you go back? I’m done.”

I had no ties to anyone or anything—“outta sight outta mind”—so I was not conflicted, in elapsed time sequence, to clock out on my last freelancer shift at one of those warehouse kitchens, sublet the East Village tenement one-bedroom, kiss the girlfriend good-bye, pack the matte black Volvo, and head out to grad school. I had applied for a spot at Iowa—which everyone I asked advised me was the best and most famous writer’s program in the country—but instead had gotten a spot at the University of Michigan in the master’s program for fiction writing. That September, I rolled into Ann Arbor to start a whole new clean and kitchen-free life.

The very first thing I did when I got there was land a kitchen job. Because I can’t sleep at night—let alone aspire to write National Book Award–worthy prose—if I don’t have a job. Misty, when I met her, was grilling boneless chicken breasts for U of M tailgate parties wearing a stained, faded V-neck T-shirt and a dirty apron. I didn’t see anything in her but the tired, slightly beaten chef of a perfectly decent catering company in downtown Ann Arbor. While I had a ten-pound knife kit brimming with tweezers and Q-tips, fish spatulas and needle-nose pliers, she was assembling rigid, odorless cheese platters for university functions. I had cooked for the king of Thailand. She was, I thought, simply the source of my future paychecks and nothing more.

The next day I went to register for school, and when I walked on Michigan’s campus for the first time, strolling the Diag with its pristine landscaping and swiping my student ID at the library, which looked like one of those buildings in Thomas Jefferson’s America, I was ebullient. I had not visited any campus during the application process. I had just cast my net and hauled in the best offer and then followed it to Michigan, for whatever awaited me. When I saw the one-hundred-year-old columns of Angell Hall, I skipped up all twenty-five of its granite stairs. I sat in every single leather chair on all four floors of the Rackham Graduate School. I stared at all the oil portraits. If I entered a room with a Persian carpet, I took off my shoes and socks and walked barefoot on it. If there were cheese cubes in the writer’s room, I ate them with delight. Alternative high school and alternative college, housed in old barns or in prefab modular units of click-together plywood, were a necessary and important part of my development, but had trashed my own sense of validity. But this—this highly polished marble floor, this leather chair, these brass banisters, these chandeliers—this was Total Legitimacy. Everybody I met